🦋 Various places in China
ä½ å¥½! We spent the past two weeks in China. Some scattered notes about being there, below the fold; and click on the picture of us at the Confucian temple in Shanghai for a photo album.
 4/10
Arriving in Shanghai! I took a separate flight from Ellen and Sylvia, in order to make best use of frequent flier miles -- I was supposed to get there a little before them but my flight was delayed, got there a little after them. I took the train into the city and met them at the hotel -- riding the maglev train (top speed 430 km/h) into Shanghai after dark is a fantastic thing, the sepulchral freeway interchanges looming up out of nowhere and receding into the night... We are staying at the Magnolia Bed and Breakfast on Yangqing Lu. (Recommended! This ended up seeming like a very nice place to stay, not removed from the city the way a large hotel can feel.)
4/11
This morning is gray and a bit chilly. I walked along Yangqing Lu, a lovely street which is operating fairly early in the morning, ate a tasty steamed bun for breakfast in the Tianhan park at the end of the block. Across from the park are the steamed-bun shop and a couple of vendors of fried pastry, plus two fruit and vegetable markets and a supermarket, and two restaurants which open up later; further down the street are our hotel, a convenience store or two, a barber shop, an excellent ramen shop, and a couple of other restaurants; also an auto-body shop and what looks to be a plumber’s shop.
We are walking through Shanghai today -- through some parks to the People’s Square neighborhood, then along Nanjing Lu to the Bund. The parks just south of People’s Square are lovely and very nicely laid out. Ate lunch near the Bund and then I was trying to navigate us to a subway station near there, and got us pretty lost...
4/12
These mornings have been passing very slowly. It is early afternoon and we’re already back on Yangqing Lu eating lunch in our room. A busy morning, we went to the Children’s Welfare Institute to give the kids toys (Ellen and Sylvia bought them at Bao Da Xiang Shopping for Kids when we were on Nanjing Lu) and to take some pictures for expectant adoptive parents back home; then walked around in old Qibao, took a boat ride on the canal there, looked in some shops. I felt tempted to buy a cheapo erhu... (Looks like it would not be that difficult to make one.) We stopped in a bookstore and Sylvia spotted the Mandarin edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire which she absolutely had to have...
In the evening, Sylvia and I headed back to Di Shui Dong, where we ate last night -- their pumpkin rice, which is sweet sticky rice served inside a steamed squash, is high on my list of favorite foods from this trip. Afterwards, we stopped to buy ice cream at Garden Books and I picked up a copy of First 100 Chinese Characters for Sylvia so she could figure out what some of the words in her new Harry Potter book mean. Brought ice cream back to Ellen.
4/13
This morning we took the metro to Pudong (the futuristic-looking skyline across the river from Shanghai), to visit the IB school where a friend of a friend had set up a visit for us. There was some miscommunication -- I guess we thought we were visiting a school in a foreign country to get a sense of what was similar and what was different to school in our own country, and they thought we were visiting a school in a country which we had just moved to, in interests of applying for a spot for Sylvia... We went with the flow and just looked around, and were vague about how long we’d been in Shanghai. On our way to the school, I successfully asked directions to Eshan Lu from someone who did not speak English, which made me happy. (It helped that I already had a fairly good idea of where we were.)
Now we’re at the railway station waiting for the train to Suzhou, an old silk production city west of Shanghai were we are spending our afternoon. Hoping I navigated the ticket vending machine menus correctly -- the ticket prices are quite low, I’m not sure why the return ticket cost twice as much though. (As it turned out, the return ticket was on a bullet train, much faster than the conventional train we rode going there. Surprising but fun.) Ellen and Sylvia are looking for a snack. The station is huge but not particularly confusing.
 A poem in Suzhou:
The rigorously concentric octagons of the Beisi pagoda --
I was up there! Looking 8 stories down on smoggy Suzhou! --
Its enormous, hilarious Buddha,
Its tour guides’ voices mechanical in their bullhorns.
My green tea bottle octagonal too,
That I’m drinking in the Buddha’s gaze.
Across the street from the pagoda is the Suzhou Silk Museum, full of marvelously elaborate looms and mock-ups of silk farming methods. We tried to go to see a garden in the south part of town but got there just before closing time. We drowned our sorrows in a tasty dinner at æ¨å››é¾™è™¾åŸŽ -- the lack of translated menus was intimidating, but the party at the next table had an English speaker in it who offered to help us.
4/14
Bicycle tour of Shanghai (primarily the French Concession) this morning -- riding around was pleasant and I enjoyed chatting with Paul, the tour guide. He is a carpenter from Manchester, his wife is on a 2 year contract teaching at an international school in Pudong. Ellen and Sylvia are back at the hotel taking a rest, I got a haircut. This evening we go to see the magnificent Shanghai Circus.
4/15
Left Shanghai for the second time in my life. This morning we visited Yuyuan Gardens and my previous visit there, with baby Sylvia in my arms, was heavily on my mind. I had forgotten how cool the constructed caves are. We walked (through a huge open-air farmer’s market, beautiful street scene) south to the textile market, to shop for silk for Sylvia’s bat mitzvah dress. 
The mountains in Guilin are spectacularly weird, they jut straight up out of the level plain around them -- it strikes me as very similar to the geography of Herriman’s Coconiño County, a geography I have never seen in the real world. — Also, in this photo, they look kind of like a roller coaster seen from a distance.
4/16
 We are in Seven Stars park in Guilin. A big park, lots here of interest -- I climbed a staircase up to the top of one of the mountains and got to see three wild baboons up there, two adults running along the path and a kid who fell out of his tree.  Halfway up, four musicians were jamming on erhu and suona. And there is a zoo! With pandas and red pandas! At the monkey house, one of the youngest monkeys had figured out how to climb out through the roof of the enclosure and was taunting one of his elders.
4/19
A few days later, in Beijing. We are staying at Michael’s House, which is a pretty ideal inn in the northwest corner of central Beijing, just outside the old city walls near the Jishuitan subway stop. This morning, Ellen and I took a walk along the canal that marks the northern boundary of the old city. We met our tour guide and she took us to the (formerly) Forbidden City and to lunch -- now she and Ellen and Sylvia are looking in the modern art quarter northeast of the city.  I am at Qian Hai -- walked through the hutong neighborhood east of Bei Hai and saw a great mural, just the words "constructive emptiness" on a brick wall.
The Forbidden City is huge and beautiful and crowded. The gentle curve of the wall along Bei Hai made a nice contrast to its orthogonality. The island in the middle of Qian Hai is covered with willows; they are lovely against the gray-blue sky behind them, their drooping branches hanging down in straight lines.
posted evening of Friday, April 22nd, 2011
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nice!
very!
posted morning of April 23rd, 2011 by cleek
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